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S UP IN THE UK
behind the news
building stretches as far as St Anne’s Court, with that section having a separate entrance). That will give 4MC both linear and a non- linear operations on site.
“Phase two is the sound
area. We’ve two full sound
mixing areas,” says Kay.
“Phase three is the stream
amalgamation. We combined
both of our new media areas
into this sight fairly early on
in the process. Phase four is
the telecine operation which
involves bringing all the
telecines together in one
area. And phase five is to
amalgamate the duplication
facilities. We hope that by August of this year the whole thing will be under this roof...”
4MC in America are taking a fairly hands off approach to managing the new company. A senior person from the American firm comes over once every six weeks or so to check on how the develop- ment’s going, but in general, Kay says, they’re happy to take a supportive role, leaving the day-to-day oper- ation in his and Pannaman’s hands. There’s no deny- ing, though, that the 4MC name offers the new com- pany great opportunities for growth.
“One of the problems that Nick and I had as TVP of old,” says Kay, “was that it was effectively just the two of us and standing there in front of large corpora- tions as two chaps as opposed to ‘Well we’re part of Carlton’ or ‘We’re part of Virgin’ or ‘We’re part of who-
ever’ wasn’t as easy and it was becoming more difficult in some areas. It wasn’t a major obstacle but it made sense to go the 4MC route.”
“A lot of the clients they have, we have. Of course they’re spending much more money in LA,” Kay laughs “But there’s definitely a tan- gible link there that helps the situation.”
On the technological front, 4MC is gearing up for the future. They’ve just acquired a high-level indus- try standard C-Reality telecine machine (“We’re in the process of testing a sec-
ond one, so telecine-wise we’re really ramping that up”), their sound suites have all just completed the move over to being completely digital and plans are well under way to reconfigure their current library system (“Ultimately we’ll pull the library in Golden Square over here and reconfigure that under Xytech which is a complete bookings, library and manage- ment system”). Meanwhile, Kay estimates that the amalgamation will create easily the largest duplica- tion and dubbing area within the whole of London.
“And finally there is the multimedia side which we’re developing and expanding as we go along. The number of DVD titles that we develop is constantly on the increase and revenue for that division is doubling. It’s really moving at a pace,” says Kay. With work com- ing from drama producers, major broadcasters,
music companies, corporate clients, advertising agencies and sports programmers, Kay is justifiably proud of the company’s broad client base. “We’re heavily into the theatrical distribution side but there’s always been a decision never to target one specific area. We don’t want the facility to be behold- en to just one or two clients.” But how is that broad range of clients responding to the amalgamation?
“We had a party recently and none of them had any qualms about coming to that,” Kay smiles. “They certainly seemed happy with it all. Obviously they’d like it all finished and done, so would everybody, but I think that the development we’re trying to make and, so long as the service that we provide is up to the standard that it was - or maybe even better - then I don’t really see why they would have a problem.”
Recent assignments include The Vice (8 x 50mins episodes for Carlton), Wives & Daughters (4 x 75mins episodes for BBC), Monsignor Renaud (4 x 75mins for Carlton), Madame Bovary (2 x 75mins for BBC) and Murder Rooms (2 x 60 mins for BBC).
Some work they did for Disney on the techno- thriller Enemy Of The State seems to prove that the new 4MC is as good, if not even better, than the old TVI and TVP.
“We basically did a full restoration on the Enemy Of The State project. The master that we received had quite a few problems on it, including camera- work problems, and we used quite a few devices here to clean it up through DVR and through Aurora which is a picture stability device,” Kay explains, adding, “I understand that it made quite an impression on a few Disney people out in LA.” ■ CERI THOMAS
Photos opposite page: Nick Pannaman and Simon Kay Joint Managing Directors of 4MC
above: guests and staff enjoying the 4MC launch party held at the Commonwealth Institute, London on 14 January 2000